


Counting Down

by nerdyalice



Category: Being Human
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 11:12:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdyalice/pseuds/nerdyalice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suicide is one of the hardest acts to commit, what would be going through your mind if there was a gun pointing to your temple?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Down

The gun. It was always going to be the gun. Click off the safety. Click on the watch. 1. 2. 3. Tick, tick, tick, tick. 

He’d cleared off his desk and boxed up his scant belongings, always organised. It would make things easier for those who eventually came to sell off his estate. Not that he had amounted much. Oh yes, sure he’d earned a fair sum throughout his years at the Department of Domestic Defence, but the material things and the superficial were of no interest to him. The few items of importance were laid out in front of him in perfect alignment; his wallet, phone, pen, notebook, ID and the Yahtzee dice game given to him by his father. If ever there was a time for sentiment, now was it he’d conceded.  
His flat was bare and spacious, devoid of extravagance and personal affects. He had even emptied the fridge; being dead was no reason to let the milk go bad.

10\.   
The icy metal touched his temple.

It had to be the gun. He'd contemplated a long list of other methods; he was nothing if not meticulous within every aspect of his life and soon to be death. He pondered idly how long it would be until he was found. He never saw his neighbours. Oh sure, all their daily routines, all the small details of their lives and their best kept secrets, were indexed in his brain; but he'd never been round for a cup of tea. If he wasn't seen for several months he doubted any of them would bat an eyelid. His presence in the world was already ghostlike. And there was the first reason for his choice of exit, a shot being fired should cause investigation or at the very least some notable thought of 'I wonder what that was'. Besides, it was an affluent apartment block, surely they wouldn't put up with a smell for very long.

20.  
A steely reserve must be kept. Breathe in, breathe out. He watched the second hand, it had never moved so slowly.

This was the best way, instantaneous obliteration. He didn't want any way out; he didn't want to die retching up drugs or struggling to get out of a noose.  
Of course he'd seen too much to be naive enough not to realise maybe it wouldn't be the end. To pull the trigger and end up as a T1 would be the ultimate insult. A twist of fate that would be so irritating, so unfair; he wanted to leave this world not linger like an echo. Then again, he could always haunt Alistair. Maybe that would make him realise how wrong he was; that these ex-human creatures truly could be a threat to the living, breathing, non hairy on the full moon population.

30.  
He held incredibly still, though internally trembling with fear. 

So he’d resolved every possible issue he could think of. He signed the relevant papers and made sure all debts were paid few of which were financial. At one point he contemplated a so called 'bucket list'; however it wasn't long before he resolved there was nothing he wanted to do. He'd travelled with his work; meeting and greeting similar faculties to his own operating in other countries, sometimes even helping to set up departments in those regions. It would have been little use keeping the UK in the dark only to have Werewolves ripping through the Métro de Paris or vampires enjoying a feeding frenzy during Rio de Janeiro's Carnival. He hadn't had a family of his own or a long term partner, yet he regretted neither. It only would've meant lying to someone everyday about who he really was. Duty never ceased. No one else would've understood. There were few memories of his father during his childhood, it hurt at the time. At the tender age of twelve when the true nature of the world was reviled to him everything finally clicked into place.  
Success had come at a cost; however it undeniably had come so that wasn't an issue. The only thing that irked him was the inability to save the DODD. If he was going to have any unfinished business, he was possible that would be it.

40.  
The ticking of the clock accompanied by the sound of his pounding heart, echoed in his ears.

This would just be the last death on a very long list. Making people disappear in a puff of smoke may have been how he'd referred to it; but even smoke left a trail, left a mark. They were like nicotine stains upon the ceiling, blood stains on his soul.  
His informants oft mentioned death coming in the form of a door if such a thing was true he supposed he was about to find out. Doors and corridors they'd said, and shadowy beings who put fear into the creatures themselves, the men with sticks and rope apparently. It made him curious to know more. If each person got their own individual 'door' what would his look like? All his life devoted to collecting and hiding evidence of the supernatural, macabre and occult had given him a twisted view. The facts held dear to them only spanned this plane of existence, just how far did the deepest darkest crevasses of the universe reach? It was highly doubtful he'd end up in a good place he thought, that was one of the sacrifices he had made for his position. Anyway, suicide committees were supposedly damned to hell weren't they? Or the civil service according to one cult hit, those connotations were an even more terrifying prospect.

50.  
Come on now Dominic, you’ve got this far.

He braced himself, mentally blocking out further thoughts. Eyes boring into the clock face. His composure was starting to wear. The timer was needed; once that began to tick he was stuck to his decision. Without it, there was a fair chance hours would have passed whilst he toyed with the idea, played with the gun. Perhaps he may have flipped and taken it out into the streets. Heck he'd killed an astonishingly monstrous number of witnesses and inconveniences on his own over the years. If he couldn't oversee a cessation of violence for the sake of mankind, going out in a blaze of bloody murder would be a kind of tragic irony.   
No, he would go with quiet dignity; without a rage or acting wrath upon his persecutors, neither dramatic note nor confessing tale of his life. Less than 10 people alive even knew his name; it would be as if he never existed.

 

The continuous momentum, the passing of time was almost at an end.  
57.  
Flinching in anticipation  
58.  
Da da da da Da da da da Da da da da daaa

It was not a heavenly chorus but the ring-tone of his mobile telephone.  
He be very carefully took the gun away from his head, placing it on the desk, fully taking into account the precariousness of it's loaded barrel.  
"Hello?" He answered half expecting it not to be real but some kind of delusional hallucination bought on by a deep routed survival instinct.   
The voice on the other end came as a vast surprise.  
He didn't expect his guardian angel to come in the form of a 500 year old murderous vampire.

3\. The watch continued ticking; round and round without a blip. Today was not the day it would stop.


End file.
